and frequently stepped streets. Now they had emerged from the cool shadows of one of those streets into a large square in front of the blindingly white alabaster-fronted royal palace. Two flights of white steps led up to it, divided by a half-landing on which stood two guards in gold and cream Mughal robes and turbans, their presence more for effect than anything else, Keira suspected.
Facing each other across the square, adjacent to the main palace, were two equally impressive but slightly smaller palaces, and it was towards one of these that Sayeed directed her.
‘Jay has taken over the palace that was originally built for a sixteenth-century Maharaja, whilst the one opposite it was built at the same time for his widowed mother, who had been a famous stateswoman in her own right,’ he said.
Sayeed spoke briefly to the imposing-looking ‘guard’ at the entrance before urging Keira up the flight of marble stairs and into a high square hallway that lay beyond them. She was feeling increasingly nervous by the minute. It had been bad enough when she had believed that her prospective client was an exacting and demanding billionaire, but now that she knew he was also a ‘royal’ her apprehension had increased.
He might be royal, but she was a highly qualified interior designer, who had trained with one of the most respected international firms, and whose own work was very highly thought of. She had very high standards and took pride in the excellence of her work, she reminded herself stoutly. She was a professional interior designer, yes. But she was also the daughter of a woman who had sold her body to men for money to feed her drug habit. Where did that place her on the scale of what was and what was not acceptable? Did she really need to ask herself that question? Of course she didn’t. The burn of the shame she had known growing up because of her mother was still as raw now as it had been then.
It hadn’t just been her great-aunt who had rammed home to her the message that her mother’s lifestyle made Keira unacceptable and unwanted in more respectable people’s social circles.
After her mother had died and her great-aunt had taken her in, Keira had had to change schools. In the early days at her new school another girl had befriended her, and within a few weeks they’d been on their way to becoming best friends. Keira, who had never had any real friends before, never mind a best friend, had been delirious with joy.
Until the day Anna had told her uncomfortably, ‘My mother says that we can’t be friends any more.’
By the end of the week the story of her mother had gone round the playground like measles, infecting everyone and most especially Keira herself. She’d been ostracised and excluded, forced to hang her head in shame and to endure the taunts of some of the other children.
Keira had known then that she must never allow people to know about her mother, because once they did they would not want to know her. She had made a vow to herself that she would not just walk away from her past at the first opportunity. She would build a wall between it and her that would separate her from it for ever.
Her chance to do just that had come when her great-aunt had died of a heart attack, leaving Keira at eighteen completely alone in the world, and with what had seemed to her at the time an enormous inheritance of £500,000.
She had bought herself elocution lessons so that she could hide her Northern accent, and with it her own shame, and the money had also helped her to train as an interior designer. It had bought her a tiny flat too, in what had then been an inexpensive part of London but which was now a very up-and-coming area.
As a child Keira had loved her mother. As she’d got older she had continued to love her, but her love had been mixed with anger. Now, as an adult, she still loved her—but that love was combined with pity and sadness, and a fierce determination not to repeat her mother’s errors of judgement and weaknesses.
Keira never lied about her past. She simply didn’t tell people everything about it, saying only that she had been orphaned young and brought up by an elderly great-aunt who had died just before she started university. It was, after all, the truth. Only she knew about the darker, more unpalatable and unacceptable parts of her past. A past that would certainly render her unacceptable to someone of such high status as a royal prince.
They were being guided to the main reception room—a huge, richly decorated room with columns and walls of gilded carvings designed to overwhelm and impress.
Don’t think about the past, Keira urged herself. Look at the décor instead.
An Arabic-style fretted screen ran round an upper storey walkway, allowing those behind it to look down into the hallway without themselves being seen. It seemed to Keira that the very air of the room felt heavy with the weight of past secrecy and intrigue, of whispered promises and threats, and of royal favour and power courted and brokered behind closed doors.
This was a different world from the one she knew. She could feel its traditions and demands pressing down on her. Here within these walls a person would be judged by who their ancestors had been—not what they themselves were. Here within these walls she would most definitely have been judged as her mother’s daughter, condemned and branded to follow in her footsteps by that judgement. Keira repressed a small shudder of apprehension as she followed Sayeed deeper into the room.
The scent of sandalwood filled the still air. High above them on the ceiling, mirrored mosaics caught the light from the narrow windows and redirected it so that it struck the gaze of those entering the room, momentarily blinding them and of course giving whoever might be standing behind the screens watching them, or indeed waiting for them in the room itself, a psychological advantage.
Sayeed gave their names to the man who appeared silent-footed and traditionally dressed, and then bowed to them and indicated that they were to follow him down a narrow passage behind the fretted screens. It led to a pair of double doors, which in turn opened into an elegant courtyard. He led them across and then in through another door and up a flight of stairs until they came to a pair of doors on which he knocked before opening.
A man speaking into a mobile phone was standing in front of a narrow grilled open window through which Keira could see and hear the street.
No, not a man, Keira recognised with a sickening downward plunge of her heart as he turned round towards them, but the man—the man for whom she had broken the most important rule in her life; the man she had kissed and touched and told without words but with a feverish intensity that had been quite plain that she desired him; the man from whom she had then run in her shame and her fear. The man who had shown her his contempt and his evaluation of her by offering her money in exchange for the kisses they shared.
If she could have done so Keira would have turned and run from him, from all the dark despair of her most private fears—fears which he had given fresh life both through her own desire for him and his treatment of her. But she couldn’t. Sayeed was standing behind her.
The slate-grey gaze flicked over her and rested expressionlessly on her face. He had recognised her even if he wasn’t showing it.
Sayeed stepped forward to shake the other man’s hand, saying to him jovially, ‘Jay. I’ve brought you Keira, just as I promised. She’s desperate for you to give her this contract so that she can show you what she can do. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by what she can offer.’
Keira squirmed inwardly over Sayeed’s unfortunate choice of words and all that might be read into them by a cynical, sexually experienced man who had every reason to believe he already knew what she had to offer.
‘I can’t stay,’ Sayeed was continuing. ‘I’ve got a meeting I have to attend, so I’m going to have to leave you to discuss things without me. However, as I’ve already told you, I’ve seen Keira’s work, and she has my personal recommendation and endorsement.’
He had gone before she could stop him and tell him that she had changed her mind. That she wouldn’t want this contract if it was the last one on earth.
Jay watched her. Unless she was a far better actress than he believed, she hadn’t faked her shocked surprise at seeing him and realising who he was. So, a woman who hired herself out for sex? Or a professional